Firefox 4 beta 7 hits 'spectacular list of crashes' roadblock

Release pushed back to end of October

Mozilla’s bumper beta release schedule for Firefox 4 has slipped, which means the seventh test build iteration probably won’t land until the end of October.

In all, the open source browser-maker now plans to push out eight betas of Firefox before it hits release candidate (RC) stage.

But Mozilla is now a little behind schedule, as Firefox 4 beta 7 should have been out by the end of September, followed by the RC version.

In fact it’s been a month to the day since Mozilla squirted out a beta for its upcoming browser. A finalised version is pencilled for November.

Whether that date will now also change, remains to be seen. According to Mozilla’s schedule, the RC of Firefox 4 is due in the “second half of October (tentative - behind schedule)".

Perhaps Mozilla plans to quickly release Firefox 4 beta 7, followed by the RC in the next two weeks.

Mozilla said in meeting notes about development of the beta that it had wrapped up the “feature freeze” of that test build. So presumably, the beta is now imminent. Well, that is once Mozilla deals with what it described as “a spectacular list of crashes that we should grind through.”

In September, the browser maker slung out a fifth beta of Firefox 4, which came loaded with graphics hardware acceleration on Windows and a new API that lets site developers code pages that visually display audio data inside the browser.

It also included HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), which lets websites demand that Firefox always use a secure connection when visiting.

A few days after that, a sixth beta of the browser landed, in the main to address stability issues in Windows and a plugin problem on the Mac OS X. ®